This blog explores the American Revolution and contemporary lessons to be drawn from it.

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Saturday, March 7, 2015

Miscellaneous Reflections from Washington's Crossing March 2015

The Mid-Atlantic region was hit with another severe snowstorm this week, leaving at least a foot of snow in large parts of central New Jersey. I wandered over to Washington's Crossing. The Delaware River was mostly frozen over and snow-covered.

Here is the marker on the New Jersey side, looking across to Pennsylvania. On the Pennsylvania side, here is McKonkey's Ferryhouse:

In the world today, virtually the entirety of the domestic press seems obsessed with cults of personality, as political decimation passes for political discussion. There are no big ideas being discussed, not really. As a president tells us the flat-out falsehood that things in the world are not that bad, we are in the midst of a 21st century holocaust in the Middle East. Ancient archaeological sites are being destroyed. Independent nations int he Baltics are in imminent danger of aggrandizement. We said "never again" in 1945, and yet "again" has happened in Rwanda, Cambodia, the Balkans and now across the Middle East. Gone are the plain words of a Thomas Paine. Instead we have the smug rallying cries of self-absorbed columnists and pundits, regardless of reason or fact.

Here at Washington's Crossing, we are in the presence of ghosts who held big ideas. Ghosts who quite literally put their blood into their beliefs. As Americans today agonize over the most minute of slights and are obsessed with "political correctness," we have forgotten completely how to maintain perspective, to evaluate and reason. We have forgotten how to be a nation and a people. We have become siloed, lost in our own selfish pursuits. America is now us versus us. We have displaced a healthy individualism and diversity with reflex attack solely for the purpose of destruction, a blue team versus red team mindset, that knows no value other that victory for its own sake. Meanwhile, the world disintegrates.